This list will get you a system that can be booted off a CD/DVD or a USB device. It's worth mentioning that hardware auto-detection and things of that nature do not belong here. Only what's necessary to get the system on its feet, and out of the initcpio really belong here, fancier stuff can be done on the booted system anyway.

packages.list

You'll also want to create a list of packages you want installed on your live CD system. A file full of package names, one-per-line, is the format for this. This is great for special interest live CDs, just specify packages you want and bake the image.

Tip: You can also create a custom local repository for the purpose of preparing custom packages or packages from AUR/ABS. Just add your local repository at the first position (for top priority) of your build machine's pacman.conf and you are good to go!

aitab

The aitab file holds information about the filesystems images that must be created by mkarchiso and mounted at initramfs stage from the archiso hook.
It consists of some fields which define the behaviour of images.

Due to the modular nature of isolinux, you are able to use lots of addons since all *.c32 files are copied and available to you. Take a look at the official syslinux site and the archiso git repo. Using said addons, it is possible to make visually attractive and complex menus. See here.